People who have actually read Martin Luther King Jr. and are familiar with his politics and the virulence of his opponents are forever looking for ways to communicate this point: King wasn't always America's civil rights teddy bear. It's true that now he's the person that every reasonable person hugs up on and professes to love, but when he was alive, he was often viewed as a threat to the American way of life. He had an untold number of enemies and opponents, and his assassination 48 years ago contradicts the current narrative that he was an anodyne and dreamy do-gooder.

According to a 1999 Gallup poll King ranked only behind Mother Teresa when Americans were asked to name "one of the people I admire most from the century." But in the years before his death, he had fallen off the list of Americans that Americans most admired. In 1964, he was fourth on the list. In 1965, he had dropped down to sixth, just ahead of Richard Nixon. But in 1966 and 1967, the last full years of his life, he wasn't on the list at all.

In that 1967 Gallup poll, George Wallace -- "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" -- was eighth on the list of most-admired Americans. Of course, Wallace would also be shot, but not for standing up for right the way King did.

King's absence on the list of most-admired Americans doesn't, by itself, indicate how many people opposed him and his civil rights agenda. But Gallup polls show that admiration for King declined throughout the mid-60s as animus for him grew.

From Gallup:

"Gallup measured the public's perception of King in a different fashion in the 1960s, using a 'scalometer' that asked the public to rate him on a +5 to a -5 scale. The resulting data show that King's image became more negative as the years went on.

"In 1963, King had a 41% positive and a 37% negative rating; in 1964, it was 43% positive and 39% negative; in 1965, his rating was 45% positive and 45% negative; and in 1966 -- the last Gallup measure of King using this scalometer procedure -- it was 32% positive and 63% negative."

In summary: Not long before he was killed, almost twice as many Americans had a negative opinion of King than a positive one.

What's interesting about those findings from Gallup is that they were taken before King gave a speech declaring his opposition to America's involvement in the Vietnam War. In January 1966, the year the majority opinion of him swung way negative, King had taken his fight for civil rights outside the South and into Chicago. King wrote the following about his time there:

"Bottles and bricks were thrown at us; we were often beaten. Some of the people who had been brutalized in Selma and who were present at the Capitol ceremonies in Montgomery led marchers in the suburbs of Chicago amid a rain of rocks and bottles, among burning automobiles, to the thunder of jeering thousands, many of them waving Nazi flags. Swastikas bloomed in Chicago parks like misbegotten weeds. Our marchers were met by a hailstorm of bricks, bottles, and firecrackers. 'White power' became the racist catcall, punctuated by the vilest of obscenities-most frequently directly at Catholic priests and nuns among the marchers. I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I had never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago.

"When we had our open housing marches many of our white liberal friends cried out in horror and dismay: 'You are creating hatred and hostility in the white communities in which you are marching. You are only developing a white backlash.' They failed to realize that the hatred and the hostilities were already latently or subconsciously present. Our marches merely brought them to the surface."

Demanding fundamental changes to this country never has, and never will be, a way to earn the public's love. Pushing against the status quo and demanding changes is more likely to stir up the public's hatred.

On this anniversary of King's assassination, let us remember that he was hated, and let us ponder what animosity for King says generally about the majority's hostility for protest. Let the choice of Wallace as one of the country's most admired men be a cautionary tale: There may be an inverse relationship between being moral and being admired.